Chapter 124: Happy accident
MARGAUX
I woke to an empty bed.
The space beside me had cooled enough that I knew he had been gone for a while, and I lay there a moment letting myself feel the absence before deciding what to do with it. Part of me wondered if he had woken first, looked down at the position we had ended up tangled in, and bolted before either of us had to explain it out loud. It would have been like him. Retreat before confrontation, every time, when the thing he was confronting lived inside his own chest rather than out in the world where he knew how to fight it.
I sat up and stretched until my spine cracked in three separate places, then crossed the room and pulled the curtains open. Gray morning light spilled in, weak but honest, the kind of light that made the previous night’s drama look smaller than it had felt at 2 a.m. Everything always looked more manageable after sunrise. Even the things that were not actually manageable at all.
My phone sat on the nightstand.
I picked it up and stared at the dark screen without unlocking it.
I needed to call my mother. Étienne had said as much himself, that whatever was happening to me, the threads, the sight, the apparitions only I seemed able to perceive, sounded like something she had described once years ago.
My thumb hovered over the call icon and refused to move further.
I recognized the feeling immediately because I had been living with versions of it for a while now. Dread.
Plain, unglamorous dread, sitting heavy and cold in my stomach at the thought of hearing her voice.
Not because I did not love her. Because I did, and that love made every conversation we had now feel like walking across glass.
Any topic I tried to keep contained would eventually bend back toward Étienne, toward what she had known and when she had known it, toward the unbearable fact that my own mother had understood the Archambault family was innocent and had done nothing that mattered to stop what came next.
Because the question was... why would my mother want them dead? Why would she not have wanted to save her friend?
Sure... the pack did a number on its women and she probably saw herslef as more a cog in the machine than a person at this point. But still...
I set the phone face down on the nightstand.
I needed to wash my face first, I told myself. Be an actual functioning person before adding anything else to the list of things I was avoiding.
I crossed to the bathroom door and pulled it open.
Étienne pulled it open from the other side at the exact same instant.
We both froze as I took in the full picture of him.
A towel sat low across his hips, the only thing standing between decency and disaster, and water still clung to his shoulders and chest in thin rivulets that caught the morning light. Neither of us said anything for a full second. Neither of us moved. We simply stood there, registering each other, two people who had spent the previous night tangled together in his bed and were apparently still working out the etiquette of mornings after.
My eyes dropped before I could stop them.
His chest was broad, marked here and there with faint old scarring that I had not had the chance to study this closely before, the muscle beneath defined in the specific way that came from survival rather than vanity, from years of a body learning to protect itself because nothing else would. My gaze kept moving without my permission, tracking even lower, landing on the sharp cut of muscle at his hip where the towel sat low and slightly damp at the edge, threatening to give up its one job entirely.
My breath caught audibly in my throat when I realized just how jarring my gawking looked.
I took a step backward like I had touched something hot.
My foot found nothing where I expected solid floor. The angle was wrong. My balance abandoned me completely and I felt the specific, undignified lurch of falling before my brain had finished registering that it was actually happening.
Étienne moved fast.
Faster than I had time to process. His arms came around me before I hit the ground and his body twisted at the last possible second so that he absorbed the brunt of the impact against the floor instead of letting me take it unguarded. We went down together in a tangle of limbs, his arm braced firmly behind my head to keep it from connecting with stone, his face suddenly inches from mine, both of us breathing harder than a simple fall should have justified.
"Are you okay?"
His voice came out low and rough, genuine concern threading clearly through it despite how obviously ridiculous our current position must have looked from any reasonable distance.
I opened my mouth to answer but nothing came out.
All I could process was him. The solid wet warmth radiating off his bare skin where his chest pressed against mine. The weight of his arm still braced protectively beneath my head. The specific heat of his breath against my cheek, unsteady in a way that told me the fall had rattled him too, even if his instincts had compensated for it instantly and without thought.
"Margaux." His voice carried a sharper edge of worry now. "Say something."
"I’m fine," I managed, though it came out thinner than I intended.
He did not immediately move off me. For one extended, charged second, neither of us moved at all, and the air between us felt thick with everything from the night before, the kiss in the kitchen, his confession, his hand closing around my wrist while he slept and pulling me toward him without ever fully waking.
Then my eyes drifted downward again, entirely without my consent, landing on the unmistakable fact that the towel had not survived the fall with the same dignity we had.
I registered the full extent of it with the particular clarity of someone whose brain had decided this was, against all logic, the single most pressing piece of information in the entire world. Heat flooded my face so fast it felt like a physical blow, climbing from my cheeks straight up into my ears.
I turned my head sharply toward the ceiling instead, fixing my eyes there with great determination.
"You are naked," I said, my voice coming out several octaves higher than I had any intention of allowing.
A pause stretched between us. Then, infuriatingly, I felt more than heard the low rumble of laughter building somewhere in his chest.
"I was heading to get dressed," he said, "before someone opened a door directly into my path."
"That is not the point right now."
"What is the point?"
"The point," I said, still staring resolutely at the ceiling, my whole face burning, "is that you need to get off me and find that towel immediately."